Oracle OpenWorld 2009 – Day 3 Highlights

The first thing to note about day 3 is that it’s wet. I mean really really wet and really windy as well. Considering my home town of Canberra has been in drought now for many years with water restrictions in place, I haven’t seen this much rain for a very long time. That said, I believe it’s been raining quite a bit in Canberra since I’ve been traveling so perhaps things are beginning to change for the better at last.

Started the day by attending Dan Morgan’s Unconference session on 11g Rel 2 new features that don’t feature in the marketing material. Some good stuff is in there, with basic little things such as being able to now easily alter database links for example having the potential to make life a little easier.

I then presented my own Unconference Q & A session on Oracle indexes. The turn out was actually quite good and there were some really good discussions including Index Skip Scans, Locally Partitioned Indexes, dangers of Bitmap indexes, coalecing rather than rebuilding and how different it is to drop an index once it’s been created. Thank you to everyone who attended and for making the session a successful exercise, including Jonathan Lewis who started the ball rolling with the first question and some excellent comments and Tim Hall who managed to ask the first David Bowie related question 🙂

The heavy rain meant I didn’t have the patience or a strong enough umbrella to wander too far from the main Moscone complex, but I managed to catch a nice presentation by Karen Morton on how to effectively collect database statistics. She presented really well and I really it although perhaps didn’t highlight enough the perils of some of the auto statistics options, especially with regard to method_opt.

I then listened in to Dan Norris in the  OTN lounge on the new Exadata V2 offering. Certainly the columnar compression capabilities sound interesting. Of course I also heard that everything runs so fast that you might not need indexes on such a powerful beast, so perhaps my days on covering indexes on this blog are numbered 😉

I next had a look around at the other exhibition hall, practicing my golfing skills and picking up yet more t-shirts and yoyos that light up in funny ways. I’m a bit concerned that my luggage just won’t be able to hold all this stuff I’ve picked up !!

I have an interest in the Total Recall capabilities of 11g (and it’s lack of capabilities) and so attended a presentation on the improvements of Total Recall and flashback archive in 11g Rel 2. It looks like most of my issues with subsequent DDL changes on flashback archive enabled tables now being supported  one way or the other. However, I still have concerns with the potential “corruptability” of the archived historical data and the subsequent recoverability implications. It would also be a nice improvement if “who” made a particular change was more readily available without having to purchase yet more expensive database options or have to modify the table structure.

The final presentation of the day was Tom Kyte’s Top 11 new 11g Release 2 New features. His top 11 was basically:

– Do It Yourself Parallelism (with new dbms_parallel_execute feature)

– Analytics Functions (new ones such as LISTAGG and NTH_VALUE)

– Execute on a directory (and the preprocessor capabilities)

– Recursive Subquery Factory (self referencing WITH clause capabilities)

– Improved Time Travel (Total Recall improvements as mentioned above)

– You’ve got mail (new file watchers capabilities that can automatically invoke some code when a file arrives in a directory)

– Deferred Segment Creation (only allocated storage when the first row is inserted, not when segment is created)

– Flash Cache (write blocks back to disk AND an SSD like device so that subsequent reads from the SSD are faster)

– Parallel Improvements (such as better control of parallel process executions and memory parallel execution capabilities)

and both number 10 and 11 best feature, the killer one …

– Edition Based Redefinition (ability to have different versions of the same stored code running at the same time within the database)

As usual, Tom covered this topics with nice examples, in a very clear and concise manner.

On the way back to the hotel, I popped into the Blogger get-together function and had a few drinks and had the opportunity to meet and chat with a number of fellow Oracle bloggers. Thanks to the Alex Gorbachev and Justin and the OTN team for putting the event together.

Aussie Oracle Bloggers, although one of us an Aussie no more 😉

It’s been a looong day …